Gaming & Culture —

Bungie reveals the work that goes into launching Halo 3

Launching a product as huge as Halo 3 presents a very special set of …

When you're working on a project that's as big as launching the Halo 3 Legendary Edition, there is much more involved to getting everything ready to launch than people outside the project will ever appreciate. Bungie.net wanted to shed some light on this process by sitting down with Craig Carlson, who describes himself as "the global operations launch program manager for the Halo 3 launch." That must be hard to put on your business cards. They also spoke to Jeff Sanborn, who works in the Packaging and Engineering Management Group within Operations. I'm so glad I can describe my job in under three words.

The information in the interview is great: from the Chinese production, to the fact that they went with the suppliers for their keyboards to create the helmet. In fact, that was one of the things they described when asked what the most difficult part of their job has been.

Making believers of MS folks, coordinating all required activities from Legal through the actual launch, trying to generate excitement in 2006 for a product that is launching in 2007, and finally, praying that with 22 pieces to the helmet and 5 more to the base, that we did not end up with a Helmet that looked more like a keyboard.

A Master Chief helmet keyboard? Nah. At $130 this is quite the expensive collector's edition, and like a chump I'm going to buy one so I can be sure to share just how high-quality/totally-ripping-you-off the finished product is. With this much emphasis and talk about the packaging, the game has almost become secondary in the minds of many gamers; an unintended consequence of making an edition that's so expensive and intricate.

Still, I can't help but be excited about seeing how the finished product looks and feels. Give the entire interview a read; it's fascinating stuff.